Most people think Steve Jobs' first foray into business happened
in 1975, when the then 20-year-old and fellow electronics
enthusiast Steve Wozniak set up shop in Jobs' parents' garage and
began working on the prototype of the Apple I computer. But
according to Walter Isaacson's new biography on Jobs, the pair
had an earlier, less upstanding venture before Apple.

The idea was hatched in 1971, when Jobs was still in high school
in California, when Wozniak read an article in Esquire magazine
about hackers who had created a "Blue Box," a device that
replicated the tones used by telephone companies and allowed
users to make long distance calls for free. Inspired, Wozniak
strung together a series of diodes and transistors from Radio
Shack and created his own digital version of the device.

After using the invention to prank call the Vatican, Jobs had a
revelation: He and Wozniak could manufacture the devices on a
larger scale and sell them for a profit. Since the parts cost
$40, plus factoring the time it took to build, Jobs figured they
could sell them, at places like college dorms, for $150 each.

The operation was sailing along but came to an unexpected end
when Jobs and Wozniak were held at gunpoint by a man Jobs thought
was interested in purchasing one of the boxes. But even though
the hostile encounter scared the young men out of business, Jobs
and Wozniak had in fact laid the pavement for their future
business partnership.

As Wozniak says in the book, the caper gave the men "a taste of
what we could do with my engineering skills and his vision."

"If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn't have been
an Apple," Jobs recalls in the book. "I'm 100 percent sure of
that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the
confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually
put something into production."